Slightly tenuous reason to post I know: the portrait I took of Nicolas Royle as been used on the jacket of “Murmurations – Uncanny stories about bird”, an anthology of short stories about… well kind of self explanatory.

That said, it’s worth publicising, as an editor he has an excellent eye, or is it ear, for short stories. Along with Daphne du Maurier’s almost compulsory “The Birds” there’s “The Beautiful Room” by RB Russell, originally only available in a short run chapbook and a new story by Tom Fletcher. The last being reason enough for me, his “The Safe Children” being a modern horror classic.

Add to that all proceeds going to the RSPB. With the nights drawing in grab a copy to read a story on those dark train journeys home from work.

Like this:

I’ve been wanting to say something on Ewan Morrison’s “Menage” since reading it but felt I had perhaps posted enough on the author, there comes a point where stalker-ism starts to raise it’s shadowy head. Then 3:am magazine mentioned that the writer had started putting a series of films “Tales from the Mall” on YouTube. Literally just mentioned, there is a little about it on ewanmorrison.com but virtually no background information on YouTube itself.

These films are not adverts for a book as publishing companies are starting to promote titles with, but self-contained short spoken word pieces accompanied by visuals. There are no actors, a single voice reads them out against grainy hand-held video footage, or a montage of still imagery. The shorts are created by Morrison himself.

Here are two of my favourite

Incident in a Carpark- Tales From The Mall

Suicide Attempt- Tales From The Mall

I can’t think of another author who is venturing into the realms of multimedia so directly, authoring the content himself rather than collaborating. More surprising is his opening up the project and asking for submissions from the public.

I was intrigued and very kindly he answered a series of questions about the films, the reasons behind the project, and the outcomes so far. Although I’ve presented it as an interview it is in fact strung together from a series of emails. I have tried to quote verbatim but dabbled a little with the order of things for the sake of readability.

Ewan Morrison’s Tales from the Mall

In your blog you mention as research for your next novel you interviewed a wide range of people working in shopping malls. Rather than treating this material as source you’ve instead launched the Tales from the Mall project. Obvious question: why?

I’m taking a break from novel writing because, frankly I’m finding non-fiction, sociology and short fiction are the only thing that are really compelling right now. Dave Eggers “Zietoun” is a good model of socially active writing, telling of real stories. So many novels these days are just ‘making stuff up’, rewriting history (badly), setting fun feisty characters into predictable dilemmas. As a result novels seem to be more about fulfilling the format of what a novel is (a great read etc) than about the real world beyond. Writing a good novel is like getting a gold star on your report sheet for colouring in with all the right colours, inside the boxes without going over the edges.

In “Menage” it seemed some of the more sociological commentary found in “The last book you read” and “Swung” was replaced, the plot put in a more complex albeit filmic narrative structure – more of a conventional crowd pleaser. Is Tales from the Mall perhaps a reaction to omitting your usual questioning to the directions society is moving in?

Writing novels in this economic climate is a bit like doing watercolours as the city burns. The Euro and the Dollar are going into steady decline and frankly it might make more sense to be planting vegetables and learning how to shoot a rifle, than engaging in any cultural activity.

Why Tales from the Mall? Well, I truly believe that anyone who is forty and who has lived through the acceleration of the phases and methods of consumerism will wake up one day and say – shit, but I’ve seen all this before. By this I mean gadgets, adverts, trends, fashions, discoveries, news stories, wars. I’ve recently crossed a certain line where everything I take in from everywhere is like a deja-vu and a little bit of sociological reading has thrown this in perspective (I recommend anything by Zygmunt Bauman). The naked fact is that for all the innovation and supposed change we are living lives of cyclic repetition. We are going nowhere, everything has planned obsolescence built into it, and also amnesia, so we’ll come back to get more of the same.

I’m not talking just about commodities but bigger things in life, jobs, relationships. Over the last forty years we’ve moved from a job and a partner for life to temp freelance labour and causal dating. This may sound like a random connection until one day you wake up and find that internet dating is now the biggest growth business on the planet and that you’ve just re-made your CV for the 40th time and are out of work again, with no guarantee of ‘security’.

Was deciding to produce short films on YouTube – an example of our current throw-away culture with its clips stripped of context – a way of placing them in a more communal context?

I wanted to actually look, like an anthropologist, at the real ways malls have affected human behaviour, not just in planned ways. To find the eccentric and unexpected behaviours that people engage in shopping malls, and to this end I went interviewing close to a hundred mall workers in about fourteen different malls, to get their stories, folk tales, urban myths, jokes and confessions.

I want this to be an experiment in what the expanded e-book can be. With audio and video and an archive of stories by other people, links to films and docs that can help inform the subject and expand it outwards.

Does making them into short films allow for more freedom in their presentation, allowing a looser way of story telling than a novel would. Mixing devices from television, film and oral traditions.

I don’t have a hierarchy in my mind between short stories and novels, novels aren’t better because they’re bigger. Anyway, there’s not many books of interrelated short stories out there at the moment, so I get to innovate with this as a form. Also I’m mixing short stories with factoids and images.

Experimental non-fiction has less defined ’boxes’ and it has direct social relevance.

I think it’s really important to operate on a level without ambition or the idea of being a success as a reward for your work. I’m finding a simpler quieter way of working these days, and have come to appreciate the austerity of Kelman and the seclusion of Salinger. I would like to head towards something like that.

Perhaps also writing about video art rekindled a joy in making visual stories?

I have made films since I was 17 and these new ones are not the kind of thing that anyone is going to be able to hype. They are quiet little films, made because I like the process of editing and making, adding music and images, and because the stories are really simple and I think need to be told.

I used to be a TV director before that vocation practically vanished.

Is the series more experimental in that you don’t have a plan and just seeing where it might go, or seeing what new forms of story telling ‘new’ media allows?

The last thing I want anyone to say about Tales from the Mall, is that it is innovative or exciting or new. This is horse-shit. It’s no different from what the surrealists were doing, mixing images, films and poetry, or for that matter the propaganda wing of any government in the last 100 years.

I worked for many years in the media, whose job it is to keep feeding people the lie that something new is actually happening.

Of course by offering the work in a YouTube format, using computers and software in it’s creation, it beacons a consumerist work itself.

I am a consumer, and not some kind of marxist scholar. I am a hypocrite and a bourgeois. Although I don’t have a TV and don’t ‘buy’ new clothes, I shop at my local supermarket and run a car, I work freelance and have ‘shopped’ for partners online.

I wanted to dig into the root of the rot and dare ask myself the question – how much of a consumer am I? is there anything else that I am? What else do I do? How has consumerism shaped me (after all corporations have been employing world leading psychologists, since before I was born, with the sole intent of making us consume more).

Malls are the homes of consumerism, like kennels for dogs. More than that, in their accumulative power they have re-shaped our urban architecture, our sense of values, of city and community. Glasgow where I live, was a mall experiment – how many can you squeeze into on city? I wanted to wake myself and other up to the fact that Glasgow is no longer the sad post industrial place of the folk ballads – ’it was tears that made the Clyde’, but one of the most consumerist centres in the western world. Buchanan street is in fact the seventh largest ’retail avenue’ in the Globe. A better example of how a leftwing working class has let themselves be transformed into amnesiac credit card users, would be harder to find.

People are adaptable, and never wholly victims or dupes. I’ve discovered many things about what people secretly do in malls that have surprised me.

Is this what led to opening up the project and requesting other people’s contributions?

I’ve invited other people to contribute their stories, for two reasons.

This thing is bigger than me and it’s only when looking at a lot of material that we can begin to see common themes emerge – i.e the fact that many malls stories, feature both divorce and fear of children.

I’m creating a hub, or a space, shaped a bit like a mall, in which people can set up shop alongside my anchor stores (or stories). I’m interested in talking to and working with web and e-book designers, film makers, image makers or anyone who has stories to tell about experiences in Britain’s shopping malls.

Do you think creating these short films could be something that could have a revenue stream in itself… advertising, or paid content? Or more to see how spoken word stories could be pushed to into multimedia?

I do like the idea of selling individual short stories for a matter of pennies. Realistically though why would anyone buy a short story online when you can get a whole novel for peanuts. The market is reaching the bottom of the spiral into nothing, bestsellers in supermarkets retail at £2.99 now, that’s about 8p making it’s way back to an author per book in royalties. If you sell a million copies you make £80,000, that’s probably over three years. Which puts an international bestseller on the same income as a nurse.

Culture, as Adorno said, is an industry, it’s a sausage factory. Once you’ve hit forty and your kids start getting into pop and film and books, you see just how the wheel of cyclic obsolescence and re-selling works. There is nothing new or radical or even exciting in anything any ‘star’ is making right now, it’s all reproductions of reproductions. The only option really is to deliberately not try to go for making culture that is ‘exciting ’ or ‘hip’ or which can be packaged in that kind of way. I say this not as some kind of political strategy but as a means of personal survival. I find it very important to get away from all adverts and all hype and media in daily life.

Has it awoken any interest in starting a label or publishing house, with possible e-book releases/formats?

I do not have the energy, passion or learning to be one of these self-sustaining money-making web capitalists who rent out space for adverts on their web sites, and get paid per hit. I think publishers have a role, and they have to rediscover what it is in the digital age. It’s not really the author’s role to innovate in ’format’. And we are in a time of growing amateurism in all creative fields, self-publishing writers and groups of writers, schoolboy mafias self promoting themselves, trying to ’break thru’. Publishers should survive as people who we look up to as being arbiters of taste, as filters, to thin out the good work from the dross, in what is becoming a cacophony of look-at-me voices screaming into the digital void.

Spoken/oral traditions are in theory dying out but these are a good example of technology reviving the form – alongside the films have you thought about podcasts: just an audio file, perhaps distributed via iTunes with a free subscription. (Personally I think this idea very exciting; that content would be downloaded into people’s iPods for their commute into work, although I have no idea know if anyone actually uses podcasts like that in real life).

Tales from the Mall is going to keep on evolving, more films, more short stories, a book will come out of it and maybe a site, maybe iPod downloads. I have to keep it open to change and evolution.

Like this:

Last January perusing Amazon I came across Michael Marshall Smith’s “What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night”. Published as a “chapbook” by Nightjar Press. It pertained to be a new work – of some significance as there hasn’t been anything by “MMS the speculative fiction author” for quite some time. Instead, only those by Michael Marshall the thriller writer, although recently some decidedly otherworldly elements have creepy into his work. That wasn’t a typo, just an awful pun. Sorry.

I should have jumped at the chance to purchase, but didn’t, and must admit it due to ignorance. Unsure as to what a chapbook is; I instead filed it away for further something or other. And forgot. Until a mention on 3AM jolted my memory. To find it sold out.

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapbook) tells us that “a chapbook is a generic term covering a pocket-sized booklet, popular from the 16th through to the 19th century. No exact definition can be applied.” Very useful.

Before MP3 released us from the tyranny of the format there were two ways you could digest your music – the album (for adults) and the single. I am not referring to the media but the presentation. There is the EP but it’s really a bastard child, albeit a particularly cunning and clever changeling.

The heyday of the Seven inch was serendipitously in the Seventies. No nostalgia here. I am only keen on false remembrance – the mental construct of imagined times: things are better now. And the seven inch still exists.

But for a decade the single was sacrosanct. Peak sales were racked up in that decades first half, where a stateside hit could buy you a house. Or mansion. But its true cultural nascence hit with punk. Until then only the EP and album were donned with a printed sleeve. The throw-away pop disk wore a plain black or white wrapper. Punk gave rise to the printed jacket, adverts boastfully proclaimed “with picture sleeve” (let us ignore coloured vinyl). (Though in Africa singles were sleeved in the cast-off backing paper used to print table cloths, a far more colourful and apposite decoration.)

Better writers have eulogised on the singles anthropological impact. Bill Drummond in 45 and Nick Hornby repeatedly. What is agreed, is that palpable sense of excitement, of anticipation. Bringing the disk home. Slipping it out of the paper bag. Poring over the sleeves decoration, studying it to yield clues as to what lay beneath (bands were bought on recommendation, on hearsay). For punk made the adornment as intrinsic as the music. Elevated it from object to artifact.

And when it lived up to expectation: the rush, a whole world encompassed in three and half minutes. To be transported back there: placing the needle back at the spirals start and spinning again. And again. And again.

Where it differed from the EP or the album was this monosyllabic rush. This epitome. This zenith, that screamed I am it, I am all you need, your three and a half minute fantasy. I believe the average time for another act. The fact the flip was called a B side already relegated it to an apology, a mechanical necessity. For the curious and the fan boy.

If the short story is the power-chord pop equivalent of the mature concept album novel, then unfortunately it can only be served in the collective form, the EPs suffocation of the anthology. What is needed is a format where it can sing its single praise.

I’m sure everyone has got the chapbook analogy long before I labored this metaphor home.

Suppose a story so scintillating, so self-contained it needs only a cover of it’s own. In Nicholas Royle’s words, who runs the press, “deserves a cover of it’s own”.

So we return to Nightjar, publishing single stories in the speculative arena. Each one wrapped within an especially designed full-colour jacket, published in limited edition, currently around the 250 mark. Beautiful objects holding up their belief in themselves high above the impending wave of print-on-demand and e-books. A little sliver of goodness you hold in your hand, and know slipping it to a friend will pass with it a shiver of delightful badness.

This tale may have had a gloomy ending so fondly sought in gothic fiction, but at the eleventh hour I managed to attain the remaining copy of MMS. Currently in the post.

Also sold out is Tom Fletcher’s “The safe children”, a modern reinvention of the horror story with no recourse to the supernatural. A fantastic tale that lingers (or is that loiters) long after conclusion. Highly recommended but unavailable, so, before the other titles sell out, do yourself a favour and purchase the chapbooks still in stock. Don’t let your fear of an unknown format spoil your chance to indulge in some fear of the unknown modern gothic undoings.

As an end note, a coda, Postcard Records (who brought us Orange Juice) started a singles club. Where for a subscription you were posted a monthly release. With only faith in the labels taste that each proffering would cling to your heart. Continued by Subpop in the 80s with Nirvana and currently Moshi Moshi with Slow Club.

Both Salt and Route offer/ed a book club where you receive/d a jamboree of next editions (Route no longer). So pretty please (or dark ugly dank please) Mr Nightjar can we have a chapbook club to save us forgetting to monitor the blog and thus miss an edition. In the meantime for the price of a pint purchase a perfectly-bound-it’s-own-sleeve-3-minute-burst-of-literary-single.

I recently came across Stack or as they put it //STACK, one of those ideas so fantastically simple you wonder why it was never done before. Each month for a subscription fee Stack send you an example issue from a range of magazines culled from around the world. Vaguely left field independently published titles, the kind unlikely to be found down the corner shop news agents.

From among the smorgasbord of possibilities being offered a taster of Fire & Knives is a very intriguing prospect. Bite before buy, so to speak. The only thing that may stop me from taking up an immediate subscription is opting for just a course of another magazine they offer.

As part of the launch party celebrating the release of Matchbook Story Issue No.1, my tiny fiction ‘Foundations’ will be included in the readings. Alas my finances wont cover transAtlantic flights to splutter thirty words, but if you are in the vicinity it should be a rocking do.

Fellow author Richard Ross will be stepping up to the mike and orating my tale alongside his, due I’m told to his impeccable British accent. Rather!

Like this:

By the frequency of my posts eulogising the 8tracks site you will know my appreciation for the art of the mixtape. Would you let a computer algorithm pick what you are going to wear? So why let it choose what you listen to. Before going any further, lest we forget, let us pay respect to Muxtape who gave us the first mixtape site before legal botherers shut them down (a happy ending: they are back, but as an official artist showcase).

London has many delights, one of the more obscure being FilmFriendsForver, a movie club which shows up and coming shorts at the Queen of Hoxton for just a few quid per screening. That’s films with good music and drinking inbetween, hell, you can even drink at the bar during the films. A great evening evening out and they are lovely people to boot.

At their Best of 2009 screening I caught ‘Mixtape’ which is simple, sweet and fabulous. Like the closing line of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity it will put a great big gooey smile on your face. Made by Luke Snellin, I was delighted to find it online, and so am now able to share the joy, watch it and bring out your inner soppiness.

And if we are discussing stories with emotional heart This zine will change your life have a high calibre entry this month with Sally Weigel’s ‘Sometimes It’s Hard’, a story with a zing in it’s tale. Recommended reading.

My offering left of field acoustic, mainly covers, post-coital good for the bedroom, which could be reason enough for a lint pun. You’re going to sing, you’re going to cry, you’re going out crazy as fuck. Featuring punk arse balladeers (particularly if you make it to the end).

Like this:

When I first mentioned using social media feeds like Twitter to publish fiction or poetry the standard practice was to post a link to the latest episode. An obvious solution to the limit of Twitter’s 140 characters or a 160 letters for SMS. (Ever wondered what the Hillebrand number is?)

Since then authors like Will Ashon have attempted to subvert Twitter’s form and create an episodic tale through it, such as his twitter.com/trundlespike. Others try to stay within the character limits to produce a single self-contained story in the same vein as short shorts (my favourite generic term for flash fiction and it’s ilk).

But for me short publishing has been usurped by an idea so simple and brilliant you wonder why no-one has thought of it before, and it doesn’t utilise a digital platform, it uses a warmly familiar media…

Nestling between Twitters letter count and the 100 word limit of a drabble it promises the writer 300 characters in which to forge their tale, to be printed on the inside flap of a match book cover. It’s creator Kyle Petersen plans to strike out with the first edition in March, a man who deserves to become a leading light in the publishing world.

OK, enough of the puns already but it is a fantastic idea, and it’s being self financed by Petersen so he deserves a round of applause and hugs, and I’m not just saying that to win favour in the hope that one of my submissions graces the inaugural book. Please.

Like this:

It is common practice for literary journals to request previously published stories are not submitted.

I think I have found a quandary of the digital age: what happens when a story is accepted and published by a very fine litzine (Insolent Rudder in this case) but then the online only publication goes out of pixel (for one can’t say print?).

Unlike a story that had been printed in traditional media, where copies would still be around even when the publisher were not, in the digital realm that story has ceased to exist, it has been unpublished.

Does it then still count as previously published if no-one can point to a copy?

(It is not lost like a fabled masterpiece, for I still have a copy. Although, since I wrote it I know what happens, there’s little point in my reading it.)

Like this:

I asked him what film he used to get such tones in his photographs. How they looked as if they belonged to another era.

“Well,” he said, “you know about homeopathy? You know, those pills that retain some microscopic measure of the poison, maybe not even that. They say that you can build immunity by swallowing very low doses of a poison and slowly building up the dose. With these pills the toxin is so diluted that it doesn’t really exist. You can’t touch these pills before swallowing them otherwise you’ll taint their power. They call it the memory of water…”

“People scoff, but there’s quite a lot science doesn’t explain yet. Light for instance, they can tell you that it’s both a particle and a wave but they can’t tell why or how. They say light lives forever, traveling from one end of the universe to the other, dead stars still blinking at us in the sky.”

“Light is like those little sugar pills, the memory of light, those particles pick up a little of what’s around as they pass through, and as they travel on, the friction of history brushes it off with fresh stuff getting stuck to them all the while. If you stood on Pluto you could watch television from a week a go, all those programs incessantly chatting away to themselves across the luminiferous aether.”

“Now, what I do, and I shouldn’t be really be telling you this, is rummage through antique and junk shops looking for old cameras. Searching for something in particular mind you, not any old camera, and not some specific make or model. What I need to find is one with a good patina of dirt on it, dust and fluff all jammed in the crevices and dials. Shows me it hasn’t been opened up in along time. I clean them up well, never tempted to open up the back and take a peek inside. Cameras being light tight means all the dirt and grime is on the outside of the lens and they polish up sweet.”

“Until it’s time to load the film that is. I use any photographic stock, doesn’t matter. What is important, what really counts is the loading. I use my own blackout bag, squash all the air I can out of it, just to make sure. Then load the film in quick as I can. You see between the lens and the film is a little pocket of light, trapped there in the darkness of the bag. A little bubble of light from decades a go, sticky with all the moods and fashions and attitudes of way back then, and just enough of that old light gets pushed against the negative when the new rays come rushing through the aperture as I take the picture.”

Like this:

Holidays are traditionally a time for reading, and since I have broadband whilst away, the less popular pursuit of sorting out my plethora of unreviewed browser bookmarks. Now I am able to combine both these past times in a single post…

Ewan Morrison’s new novel Ménage was published a month a go, I mention this for two reasons. First, he was perhaps the final contributing factor in starting me writing, but secondly and more importantly for the world at large, he has contributed a short story to the online lit-zine Dogmatika.

Like this:

Curiosity got the better of me, and bowing down to the pressure of my internal voices (you are just jealous because they don’t talk to you…) I asked Robert McEvily, editor of Six Sentences, which of the two stories I submitted were chosen for the second anthology.

I’ve received his reply and can now decode the cryptic headline to this post – both stories are to be included in the new volume of six sentence long tales. Particularly pleasing as one of them, “Wedding” was especially written for the collection, the other one is “Minicab driver”.

There’s more, the industrious Mr McEvily who deserves thanks and praise from writers everywhere for his hard work in providing such a splendid platform, has set a publication date – March 31st.

Today Six Sentences announced the initial list of authors chosen to be included in the second anthology of stories, all six sentences long.

And yes, they chose one of mine… rather happy.

I would like to tell you which story is being publishing, but at the moment all I know is that I’m in (and that’s good enough for me). I sent two, I’m hoping it’s “Marriage” as it was written especially for the collection, wonder if I’ll get to find out before seeing it in print? All the stories featured in it are previously unpublished and not available on the splendid site, so you will have to buy a copy if you want to read them.

It should be out in March, in the meantime why not buy a copy of volume 1 from Createspace or Amazon.

Robert McEvily who runs Six Sentences announced the author list in rather unusual fashion: in a Youtube video featuring the names of those chosen matted against theatre curtains. You can watch here. I am a little red-faced to say I air punched when my name went by.